Governors push back against Obamacare health insurance exchanges

Obamacare certainly is a resilient beast. The tax that isn’t a tax emerged victorious from multiple Congressional repeal efforts and a Supreme Court challenge in June, and the reelection of President Obama put an end to Mitt Romney’s campaign promise of repeal. The war isn’t over yet, though, as the battlefield has moved to individual states. Though a federal program, Obamacare relies on states to set up health insurance exchanges. The exchanges are scheduled to open on Oct. 1, 2013 to serve as insurance marketplaces for the uninsured.

Governors, though, are pushing back, and the Republican Governors Association succeeded in persuading Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to push back to mid-December a Friday deadline to declare whether they would set up exchanges.

States get more time to decide whether to build health exchanges wapo.st/ZTnfdX

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told the New York Times that rather than cede control to the federal government, “I’d much prefer control at the state level, but the problem is, I don’t think they are really state-run. Why do I want to take on the potential risk to my taxpayers if I don’t really have any true authority about what’s going to happen?”

Missourians overwhelmingly passed Prop E to bar the creation of Obamacare health exchanges without a vote of the people …